A Finished Home Is Actually Just the Beginning
A home is a living record of the people who live in it. Which, ironically, makes the day an interior designer gives the finished home to the client the start of its story.
Everything is too new in the beginning. The stone has yet to meet the accidental spills, the bedroom chair hasn't begun its second career as a clothes rack yet, and none of the drawers have become a junk drawer. Not in the kitchen. And not in the bedroom. Add in a few kids, a few holidays, an argument in the kitchen here and there, a little patina on the door handles, and then boom, it starts looking like life happened there.
Jerry Chen tells clients a similar version of this when Agathus Studios, the California-based boutique real estate investment and residential design studio he and his wife began, turns over a finished home. Whatever he and his wife Haran create is "actually the starting point." He encourages their clients to understand that a room is meant to age gracefully and "show all the things that happened in the space." Things should move, objects should arrive, and the idea of "immaculate" should eventually lose the war against the actions of the inhabitants of the home.
The Objects That Matter Most Aren't Always the Most Expensive
Haran's own proof adorns a wall in the home. In their twenties, on one of their first trips alone together, she and Jerry wandered into an artists' neighborhood in Barcelona and caught an artist stopping by his studio. He let them in, walked them through his atelier, and they left with these wall hooks sculpted into the faces of small children. "It's so playful and so whimsical," Haran says. "But it also really transports us back into that time in our lives every time we interact with it."
Jerry's equivalent is an orange circle drawn on printer paper. He loves basketball and has been trying, without the most success, to convert his son into a fellow acolyte. On Father's Day, their son drew him a basketball on printer paper and Jerry now has it enshrined on his nightstand. "It's just this very poorly drawn orange circle on printer paper," he says with a laugh. "But to me, it's absolutely priceless."
And this is the part of designing your home that no amount of procurement or specifying can solve. It's also at the core of what makes Agathus Studio so unique. Even the studio's name is the natural expression of the people who brought it to life.
How a Greek Idea Traveled From Athens to Taiwan to California
Jerry's grandfather was a Chinese Navy captain stationed in Greece before the Chinese Civil War. His father spent part of his childhood in Athens before finally settling in Taiwan. Jerry grew up there with what he affectionately describes as a very Chinese father with a very Greek obsession. "He loves Greek food," Jerry laughs. "So imagine, I'm growing up in Taiwan, but he's always taking us to any sort of Greek restaurant or Greek festival as a family trip." His father would tell him stories about backyards sprouting olive trees, oil pressed close to where it's eaten, and the Mediterranean relationship between daily life and whatever grew right outside. "To me, it was like listening to this almost mystical land that he was always describing."
Years later, when he and Haran needed a name for the practice they were building in California, this way of living resurfaced again. Agathus is a branch of agathos, the Greek word associated with goodness and benefit to others. How amazing is it that a life in Athens forever changed the life of a Chinese boy, traveled with him into his family's sensibilities in Taiwan, and then emerged a generation later as a symbol of meaning for his son and his son's wife.
The truth about inheritance is that it's completely fine taking the scenic route.
Inheritance Is More Than the Things We Leave Behind
We have a bad habit of withholding the word inheritance unless we're talking about property or jewelry. However, domestic culture gets passed down just as much, if not more effectively. Some families pass down the conviction that nobody should leave the house hungry, or that you should never walk into a room without addressing everyone there. These things didn't need to be put into a will or formally handed down in ceremony. They're behaviors wrapped in memories that then become aesthetic decisions we make without being conscious of it.
Haran has an amazing theory for why this matters.
"We shape our environments," she says, "but the environments also continually shape us."
Our Homes Shape Us Back
This idea that we arrange rooms and spaces according to an idea of who we are and then spend years being instructed by these spaces is worth chewing on. If you think about it, where you place a chair in a room helps to dictate where your attention goes. A table can either encourage a large group gathering or encourage intimacy. A beautiful sitting room can remain untouched because using it feels like violating some unwritten rule. This all reflects Haran's point that "a home shouldn't just be a reflection of your values. It should make those values easier to practice."
Once you hear that, a room becomes that much harder to judge from a photograph. People can spend thousands furnishing a formal living room that never hears a single good conversation because the entire family prefers to talk in the kitchen leaning up against the island. This is a challenge for the modern homeowner. Simply maintaining your space or renovating it to adhere to some form of architectural tradition, even when it serves no purpose for how you actually live your life, is a quick way to complete a home in theory but get stuck with the nagging feeling that something's not quite right.
The couple's New York years helped them avoid this trap early. In New York, square footage is too expensive for sentimentality. A living room in a one-bedroom apartment with two adults and a baby winds up being a dining room, playroom, office, and hosting space at any given moment. So the very idea of intentionally designing a space becomes second nature because every object needs to "pay its rent."
Their Careers Changed But the Work Remained the Same
This way of thinking owes something to the careers they had before they entered the world of real estate investment and residential interior design. Jerry designed user interfaces, studying where people's attention would drift to and where friction would enter into the experiences. Moving from screens to homes helped to shrink the audience for him and deepen the intimacy.
"My work before was very macro," said Jerry. "You're thinking about how it works for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. Now, it's specifically [them], the client. What works specifically for [them]?"
Haran meets at the same place but through law. She worked in federal civil-rights litigation and appellate criminal defense. Often representing people who were falsely arrested or wrongfully convicted, a successful Tuesday looked like making substantial changes in a client's life, whether that's overturning a conviction or securing reparations after government misconduct. "It's more of the analytical, top down, strategic way of thinking; the ability to read between lines or just understand people and what they want" Haran says when considering what her previous career path taught her in preparation to where she is today.
Both of their careers could look like they underwent a reinvention, but neither Haran nor Jerry looks at it that way. "In that respect," says Haran, "[those] skills are both universal and niche skills that carry over quite well to what we're doing now." Both are still doing good for the betterment of others. Both are still leveraging skills honed over the years. Skills like observation, which translate into a superpower in the world of Agathus.
Eventually, Everything We Experience Becomes an Inheritance
When I spoke to Haran and Jerry, they had recently returned from Korea and Taiwan after facing a typhoon that delayed their travels. Haran hadn't seen Korea for fifteen years, and Jerry hadn't seen Taiwan for eight. Their children were visiting both places for the first time. Years from now, some detail from these adventures will reappear elsewhere in how they live their lives. It could be a meal, a ritual, or how they choose to arrange their rooms when they're off to college or get their first apartments. And maybe they're able to trace its origins the same way their father did, or maybe they understand it intuitively as their mother does. Either way, their spaces will reflect what was passed down to them.
A home is inevitably a record of who we are. Rooms hold our experiences, and how we design our interiors encourages our behaviors. Those behaviors become rituals we can't help but pass down to others who share enough moments with us. Then years later, in some distant room, when it surfaces again, it'll have the opportunity to be a benefit to someone new without them ever knowing where it came from.
Haran and Jerry Chen are the co-founders of Agathus Studios, a residential design and real estate investment practice in Southern California. All photographs courtesy of Agathus Studios.
